Poets’ Roundtable November 17, 2016
Welcome
News and Jabber
I actually came across this name some months ago but didn’t follow up on it. Here we have a wonderful, young poet of great talent writing poems for and about today’s world. I often speak of poetry of witness. This is excellent, fluid, fluent poetry of witness. Solmaz Sharif’s book, Look is now on my Christmas list. The excerpt below is from "Reaching Guantanamo".
Dear Salim,
said I need to
my tongue. It’s getting sharp.
I told him to _________his own
business, to _____his own
wife. He didn’t .
If he wasn’t my
I would never
again. Sometimes, I write you
letters I don’t send. I don’t mean
to cause alarm. I just want the ones
you open to
like a hill of poppies.
Yours,
Born in Istanbul, Turkey, to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People; and New York University. She is the author of the poetry collection Look (Graywolf Press, 2016). Her first published poem, included in A World Between: Poems, Short Stories, and Essays by Iranian-Americans (George Braziller, 1999), was written at the age of 13. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness and other publications. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Sharif has had her work recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships from NYU and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass. Most recently, she was awarded an NEA fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship.
In 2014, Sharif was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University.
From this Newsweek online article:
http://www.newsweek.com/weirdly-beautiful-war-poetry-solmaz-sharif-517342 I urge you to go there to view the video that accompanies the article.
One poem lists American military operations: Beastmaster, Hickory View, Riverwalk, etc. Another lingers with dark, dry humor on “WARHEAD MATING” and “HEIGHT HOLES.” A third injects missile-technology lingo into the Book of Ecclesiastes: “For what is your life? It is even a THERMAL SHADOW.”
The poet responsible for these verses is Solmaz Sharif, and when I meet her at a fashionable Oakland, California, café, she looks like one of its fashionable denizens, not someone who, by next week, could be the winner of the National Book Award for Look, her first book of poetry, which is political and confessional—and which relies heavily on terminology from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms.
Not even the title of the volume is exempt from this intriguing confluence of the personal and the martial. Look is an invitation to the reader, but this most quotidian of words also describes, according to the military dictionary, “a period which a mine circuit is receptive of an influence.”
For Emily Dickinson, life was “a Loaded Gun.” For Sharif, it is a mine primed to blow. The title poem (which contains the Ecclesiastes reference) moves from a moment of intimacy, to a Hellfire missile being fired on Iraq, to a kind of unease about the American project, as befitting a poet born in Turkey to Iranian parents who settled in Los Angeles. As far as poetry goes, this is closer to Apocalypse Now than John Ashbery.
Which is how Sharif wants it. The job of a poet, she says, is to be “a bane to the republic. Because the republic is built on a destruction of language. A kind of obliteration of language that will enable and excuse violence against bodies. My job is to interrogate and agitate that as often as I can.”
Moving between the personal and political, her poetry is always in a state of tumult—a state of war. Every one of the words from Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms are rendered, as above, in all caps. The effect is a muraled wall riddled by gunfire, photographed and turned into art. Sharif tells me that she wanted the military terms to act as “these little disruptive markers of violence” that would remind readers that war is a constant presence in our lives, as much here as it is over there.
The poet Solmaz Sharif.ARASH SAEDINIA
She points to the varnished table where we sat, to her crumbled scone and my avocado toast. War was happening here too, she says. Only we need the courage to see it. Perhaps because of her ethnicity, or her convictions, Sharif sees it everywhere:
My father is not afraid of
SEDITION. He can
SEIZE a wild pigeon off a Santa Monica street or watch
SEIZURES unfold in his sister’s bedroom — the FBI storming through.
Although the first-person voice throughout Look is not always Sharif’s, the poems do follow her family’s journey. Some of the poems are about her uncle, who was killed in the Iran-Iraq War. Sharif never knew him, yet she evokes him with the kind of battle-worn sorrow that the ancient Greeks lavished on their war dead:
Just, DESTROYED.
DIED OF WOUNDS RECEIVED IN ACTION.
Yes, there was EARLY WARNING.
You said you were especially scared
of mortar rounds.
Sharif is a child of conflict, born in 1983 in Istanbul because her parents had fled Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. They then moved to the United States, her mother going to the University of Alabama, her father working odd jobs in the Northeast. She imagines his experience—the classic immigrant tale—in a poem that has her father “driving a can in Poughkeepsie, lifting lumber in Rochester...my baba downing Bud Light by the Hudson.” The image, like so many in Look, is precise and evocative, the poetic equivalent of a drone strike.
Sharif’s parents eventually settled down in Los Angeles, where Sharif spent most of her childhood. She went to college at the University of California at Berkeley and graduate school at New York University. Back in Los Angeles, when she was helping a photographer friend with a project, she became enthralled with the military dictionary.
The early curiosity became a book that took Sharif eight years to write and publish. Recent Man Booker Prize winner Paul Beatty had his novel The Sellout rejected 18 times by publishers; Sharif estimates she got as many rejections for Look, maybe more. “And I want to send thank-you notes to all of them,” she says, laughing. Her manuscript was finally acquired by Graywolf Press, the revered independent Minneapolis-based press that has published the essayists Leslie Jamison, Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss, as well as the poets Tracy K. Smith, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012, Elizabeth Alexander, who read at President Barack Obama’s first inauguration, and Claudia Rankine, whose Citizen has been lauded for its take on intractable racial issues.
“Sharif disrupts our assumptions about what constitutes poetry—and simultaneously makes a poetry of protest and of lyric devastation,” says Graywolf Executive Editor Jeff Shotts. “There is nothing like this work.”
Critics have agreed, with The New York Timescalling the book “excellent.” Bookforum noted that “there’s something automatically evocative about the bureaucratic language of war, in the particular mismatch between the casualness of some words, the technological specificity of others, and the death hiding behind them all.” Tellingly, that review was written by a national security reporter for The Intercept, where Glenn Greenwald, who wrote about the Edward Snowden documents, is an editor.
To be on the National Book Award short list has been “bizarre” for Sharif, given how many rejections Look received along the way. Even more bizarre: “Trump might be president during the ceremony.” We are fretting over the polls in North Carolina and New Hampshire when Sharif considers an aspect of the Trump presidency that I had not contemplated before: “Who’s that inaugural poet going to be?”
We sit there, at a loss, wondering who might to do for Trump what Robert Frost did for John F. Kennedy in 1961, endowing his first moments as president with moral authority. Then, suddenly, the answer occurs to me. He is not a poet, exactly, but he does work in verse, whiskey bottle in hand: Kid Rock.
The Current Assignment
Who did it? I found this, as usual, an assignment that worked out for me differently from the way I expected it. A good exercise. For some reason I have been thinking a lot about people I went to school with. From kindergarten through high school Robert Sperry was a friend, at times a close friend. The assignment brought me to ponder his untimely death (almost fifty years ago) in a way I hadn’t earlier even though my mother told me about it when it happened.
The Next Assignment
The next two assignments are:
Write a poem celebrating Christmas.
Write a poem lamenting Christmas.
It doesn't matter which you write for the Dec 1 meeting and which for the Dec 15 meeting.
Write a poem celebrating Christmas.
Write a poem lamenting Christmas.
It doesn't matter which you write for the Dec 1 meeting and which for the Dec 15 meeting.
The Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on December 1, 2016.
Other Jabber
Gerard at the last meeting suggested putting together a mini-chapbook to help draft new members. Here I cite an article about that very topic and how some people have monetized their poetry. Distribution relies on e-copies which are requested and sent to anyone who asks and who are in turn are offered the opportunity to make a donation directly to the author. Read about it here:
Agent Ransack
ALSO, try this for size:
In eternal blackness, in the midst of the darkest night
Proteins and minerals, exist within specks of light
Solids liquids and gases, and sparks of light within
Infinite lengths and widths and depths and heights
No beginning or ending, the seven dimensions
Enough space for more than a million words and inventions
To travel through time within enough room to be the womb
Of the most high’s great mind which he will soon make shine
With intelligent elements in sight that he will gather
In the realms of relativity electricity struck matter
Energies explode he below to keep releasin
Atoms by the millions, til the numbers increasin
Til it was burnin he kept returnin itself to the source
The hotter his thoughts it gave the center more force
He gave birth to the sun which would follow his laws
All caused by his mental intercourse
